b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Friday, April 8, 2005
Adobe, Brother, Fujitsu and the Written Page
A while back I wrote about two very cool products I use - Adobe Acrobat 7 Profesional and the Fujitsu ScanSnap. (Someone wrote me shortly after those posts to ask if ScanSnap and Acrobat 7 work together. Yes, they do. Swimmingly.) Both of these products represent state-of-the-art paperless office technology. Acrobat 7's comment tracking feature and its ability to flow comments and changes back into Word for further editing are "must-have" improvements for anyone who does lots of document reviews.
But the little ScanSnap is what really amazes me. I used to work for IBM and we developed page scanning solutions for book publishers and printers. What we struggled to do for $100k can now be done, better, for $400. The ScanSnap software is extremely intelligent. It recognizes blank pages and leaves them out. It's de-skews (straightens) a page that scans in crooked. It detects whether the page has been inserted head-up or head-down and automatically rotates it if needed. In short, it does everything you can imagine, and at a rate of 15 pages (30 images) per minute! It also ships with a little PDF Thumbnail viewer that lets me see the contents of PDF files in a Windoze Explorer window.
This thing is so fast and so painless to use I've changed my note-taking strategy. I used to attempt to enter everything into some sort of computer - PC, laptop, PDA. But there were many times when that was either impractical or improper. Now I don't worry about it. I carry a notepad everywhere I go. I write stuff. I draw stuff. I scribble. When I get back to the office I tear out the pages, drop them in the scanner, punch a button and have all my notes in a nice PDF file.
Then I toss the notepaper in a shredder. If I have a critical original I file it away but usually I just shred the paper. If I need the note in paper form again I print it out. If I need to change it, I mark up the printed copy, rescan it, and throw the paper away again. Sometimes I still need to convert the notes to text and have to type them in, but not very often. I'm working on getting my voice recognition software trained well enough I can just read it in, but I have a ways to go with that.
One more device that makes this easy is my Brother HL6050DN laser printer. This 25 page-per-minute device prints on both sides of the sheet and has great software that lets me shrink pages to fit 2-up (or more but it gets really small) on a sheet, which means that a 100-page document can be printed out in about a minute on 25 sheets of paper. All of this makes the paper-to-digital-to-paper-to-digital cycle a quick and relatively pain-free exercise which, for me, is about as good as it gets.
Terry Frazier at 12:00 AM
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Thursday, April 7, 2005
Backing Up - Finally
I have long lamented the fact that I never back up. I complain over and over and over that I will never get caught in a computer disaster again without backing up. But I do. I build redundant systems, use mirrored RAID arrays, copy my important files from the laptop to the desktop and vice versa - but I never really back up. It's just too friggin hard. I need a tape system or something.Until now.
Several weeks ago Chris Pirillo blogged the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. UBCD4Win is the product of one Benjamin Burrows, and it's a kick-ass little toolkit for those of us trapped in Windoze hell. One of the reasons I don't back up is until now there was no easy way to boot to Windoze, have all your apps and do stuff like run diags, image a disk, etc. It's just a royal pain.
But having a recent image of your system disk - and/or data drives - is absolutely critical if you hate rebuilding a computer just because a drive crashed or some simple thing broke and took your data with it. Even if you get some bad malware infection and need to reinstall everything, having a known good disk image can save you hours (maybe days) of effort.
UBCD4Win makes all that possible. It loads up, asks if you want to load network drivers, finds all your drives, and lets you run a variety of free tools that Ben was kind enough to include. As I write this I'm waiting on my IBM ThinkPad T41 to write an image of
All in all, this is a cool thing no Windoze user should be without. Ben has gone to great lengths to make it easy to build and use UBCD4Win, and has written extensive instructions. I've been looking for something like this for years. I liked it so much I donated $50. Great job, Ben!
Terry Frazier at 6:38 PM
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Friday, March 25, 2005
Datablogging Brings Value to the Enterprise
The ideas of using RSS as a report-out language from enterprise systems and weblogs as a friendly UI have been roiling around for quite a while. But no one has tried to make a business of it. ItÂ’s a great idea and far more appealing to the pragmatic bean counters of corporate America than the touchy-feely innovation/sharing/conversation-building stuff that gets all the air time (and which bean counters hate). Below John Robb, who spurred the early conversations around this on his k-log discussion group, points to a new blogging offering designed to cater to this market.
If you want to try your hand at doing some of this for your own company have a look at Conversant, it has all the requisite parts to create a datablogging environment - custom fields for data, page- and directory-level security by user, sophisticated query functions, and multiple I/O channels.
Datablogging!
Joe Reger's new datablogging venture is awesome. This is something that has been showing signs of life for years now, but nobody wanted to start a venture to capture its value. Early applications included a server status weblog and even a blog that pulled sales data from Siebel (a very popular weblog at a huge corporation that will remain nameless). Personally, I think this method of weblogging has more of a potentially to storm the enterprise than any other application.The concept is simple. Data is usually locked up in monolithic applications (CRM, ERP, etc.). Application seats are expensive. Training is expensive. Etc. People that need the data often can't get to it.
What if human readable data flows (via RSS) could be generated by these applications? It would allow the development of easy to read weblogs (that republished these RSS flows) that almost everyone in the company would find valuable. The combinations are almost limitless and the flow is completely automated.
The flip side is also extremely valuable. Using a weblog model of data entry, it would become much easier to train people to enter data in a timely fashion. Further, they get immediate feedback on their efforts since the data they post is transformed into an entry on the blog.
Needless to say, this is very cool.
Terry Frazier at 2:18 PM
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